Some Words Fell Out of My Brain

Time to do some words for the blog.
By the time this goes up, I’ll have explained about being back at university, all that stuff, so I’m not going to bother explaining in too much detail. I’ve got a few things on at the time of writing. (The ‘time of writing’ is probably last week or the middle of this week, depending how long I wait to put this up. Depending on when you stumble across this I may have written it a few months ago. If you’re reading this in the distant future, then I apologise for this being one of the few artefacts to survive the Toaster Uprising that destroyed twenty-first century society.)

At the moment I’ve got a piece of analytical coursework that’s due in a few days, a mostly finished Lower League Week to polish off, and various story ideas battling against each other for my attention, blocking the doorway to the forefront of my mind, diseases in Mr Burns’ body style.
That’s one of the things I find really annoying as a writer – I don’t feel the stereotypical writer’s block of seeing a blank page and having no idea what to put down, I have a load of little ideas, any one of which could be useful to develop, but which collectively prevent each other from making that breakthrough.

The Hull City chairman’s a bit of a dick. He’s renaming the historic football club, (which has represented their city for probably somewhere around a century) despite the protests of the fans, because he wants a name that’s a bit different. Of course, the name itself isn’t all that important (and I don’t think Cardiff playing in red is all that bad either) but disregarding the wishes of the fans so blatantly and without even an open debate, is the bigger problem.
If you start down the road the Hull and Cardiff chairmen have gone down, it’s not long until, for example, they’re sacking experienced football executives and replacing them with the 23-year-old friend of the chairman’s son. The powerful must be accountable. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few to be a selfish little arse.

Experiences inspire writing. Not just first-hand experiences, but thoughts on bigger events, empathy with those involved.
The Philipines has been hit by a natural disaster, tearing through the houses and infrastructure, driving people from their homes, depriving them of even the opportunity to eat a full healthy meal. Having a comfortable night’s sleep will be a distant aspiration for most of them.
I piled a load of things on my bed when organising my room, so had to sleep on the settee last night, and now I have a sore neck.
I probably don’t have the experience to write that story tastefully.

Ian Duncan Smith’s attempts to reform welfare programmes have led not only to disabled people being put through a stressful situation (Atos) and being told they were able to work with broken backs and the like, but have wasted money on programmes that were never going to work.
The attempts to make the state more efficient have been massively wasteful.
I worked as a small part of a large corporation putting together a very large contract – the department had been understaffed until near the end, correspondence with applicants had gone unreplied to for months, and paperwork had become disorganised. Many of the extra staff hired were graduates or teenagers in their first jobs, so made understandable mistakes in a stressful and unfamiliar working environment. The feeling on the ground floor was that upper management didn’t know how chaotic things had become beneath them, or that their ‘assistance’ wasn’t doing much good.
Firsthand experience + the ability to draw comparisons and empathise = the basis of story.

I write morning ‘brain dumps’ like these from time to time – the idea is to get something, anything, from the brain down on paper, to start off the writing process in the morning, and turn it into something coherent later.
But my brain dumps tend to be a fairly organised explanation of the various things I’m working on, with a relatively sensible and dull explanation of each, lacking the wit or humanity to make reading them interesting or useful. I think I find it more useful to dump the whole brain, including the loose little ideas hanging round in the corners, as I’m now doing.
Holistic brain dumping.

This is the second of these ‘Incoherent Nonsense’ posts, I may do more in future.